Editor's note: This story was originally published in April. It has been updated to include the latest on the Paris climate agreement.

Thousands of scientists and their allies filled the streets of the nation’s capital on Earth Day for the March for Science, advocating for the importance of scientific truth in an era we’ve ominously been told doesn’t value the truth any longer. Just a week later, the People's Climate March in Washington, D.C., demanded policymakers not only respect science, but that they also act on it.

Advocates say science is under attack. President Trump’s Environmental Protection Agency chief Scott Pruitt doesn’t accept evidence that shows humans are causing climate change. Education Secretary Betsy DeVos' 2001 comments on wanting to “advance God’s kingdom” through education have educators worried she could undermine the teaching of evolution in public schools. Trump’s budget blueprint slashes funding for the National Institutes of Health and the Department of Energy's Office of Science.

Esteemed astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson, in an impassioned video on his Facebook page, said he fears people have lost the ability to judge what's true and what's not.

"That is a recipe for the complete dismantling of our informed democracy," he says.

The scientific community is alarmed by the Trump administration, and by what they see as the diminishing role of objective science in American life. But the General Social Survey, one of the oldest and most comprehensive recurring surveys of American attitudes, shows that although trust in public institutions has declined over the last half century, science is the one institution that has not suffered any erosion of public confidence. Americans who say they have a great deal of confidence in science has hovered around 40% since 1973.

Many scientists say there is no war on their profession at all.

According to the 2016 GSS data released this month, people trust scientists more than Congress (6%) and the executive branch (12%). They trust them more than the press (8%). They have more trust in scientists than in the people who run major companies (18%), more than in banks and financial institutions (14%), the Supreme Court (26%) or organized religion (20%).

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Marchers carry a banner at the head of the March for Science in Washington, D.C. on April 22, 2017. People across the globe are taking part in the March for Science to recognize scientific progress, raise awareness of scientific discovery, and defend scientific integrity.
Jasper Colt, USA TODAY

People head to a rally including a "lab in a lab coat" named Rodger and his owner Cate Tambeaux, holding the leash, at the March for Science at Cal Anderson Park in Seattle, Washington.
Karen Ducey, Getty Images

Protestors wear tights with portraits of scientists Neil deGrassse Tyson, left, and Bill Nye, right, as they joined demonstrators at the March for Science rally in downtown Los Angeles.
Mike Nelson, European Pressphoto Agency

Coryn Cannon joins thousands of people gathering together at the Historic Capitol building downtown Tallahassee, Fla.for the March for Science, part of a world-wide demonstration on Earth Day to promote the idea of scientific study and its relevance in society.
Joe Rondone, Tallahassee Democrat, via USA TODAY Network

Greg Short, right, joins thousands of people gathering together at the Historic Capitol building downtown Tallahassee, Fla. for the March for Science.
Joe Rondone, Tallahassee Democrat, via USA TODAY Network

Stephanie Woodend, left, a PHD student in Medical Geography at the University of Ottawa and Abby Dalton, a masters student in Geography at the University of Ottawa, participate in the March for Science on Parliament Hill in Ottawa, Canada.
Justin Tang, The Canadian Press, via AP

"We're out here to support publicly funded science and evidence-based policy," said Harbor Branch lab assistant Richard Mulroy of Jensen Beach before leading a march of more than two hundred people during the Treasure Coast March for Science along Seaway Drive in Fort Pierce, Fla.
Jeremiah Wilson, Treasure Coast News, via USA TODAY Network

Members of the Union for Concerned Scientists pose for photographs with Muppet character Beaker in front of The White House before heading to the National Mall for the March for Science rally in Washington, D.C.
Jessica Kourkounis, Getty Images

Participants gather prior to the start of the March for Science in London on April 22, 2017. People across the globe are taking part in the March for Science to recognize scientific progress, raise awareness of scientific discovery, and defend scientific integrity.
Daniel Leal-Olivas, AFP/Getty Images

Nita Carson, a retired science teacher, waits for the Metro at the Dunn Loring-Merrifield station in Merrifield, Va. on her way to the National Mall in Washington, D.C. Carson traveled from her home in Oxford, Ga., to attend the March For Science rally.
Jasper Colt, USA TODAY

Scientists and supporters attend a pre-rally at the American Association for the Advancement of Science building before heading to the National Mall for the March for Science on April 22, 2017 in Washington, D.C.
Jessica Kourkounis, Getty Images

Though science still holds an esteemed place in America, there is a gap between what scientists and some citizens think — a rift that is not entirely new — on issues such as climate change, nuclear power, genetically modified foods, human evolution and childhood vaccines.

Americans don’t reject science as a whole. People love the weather forecast. They love their smartphones. When people reject science, it’s because they’re asked to believe something that conflicts with a deeply held view, whether political (my party does not endorse that), religious (my god did not say that) or personal (that's not how I was raised).

Manyconservatives reject the science of man-made climate change, just as many liberals reject the science that shows nuclear energy can safely combat it. The views we express signal which political group we belong to. The gap between what science shows and what people believe, sociologists say, is about our identity.

“The issue of climate change isn’t about what you know,” said Dan Kahan, a professor of psychology and law at Yale and a member of the university’s Cultural Cognition Project. “It’s about who you are.”

The future of democracy

Polarization has exacerbated our differences, and we know some of what’s to blame: The rise of social media. A more partisan press. A dearth of universally-accepted experts. And greater access to information, which Christopher Graves, president and founder of the Ogilvy Center for Behavioral Science, said does not tug us toward the center, but rather makes us more polarized.

“A human being cannot grasp something as a fact if it in any way undermines their identity,” Graves said. “And that is an immutable human foible. These things have always been there, but not at scale."

The GSS data show confidence in institutions overall has been in decline since the 1970s, though political scientists are quick to caution that this is an imperfect benchmark.

Brendan Nyhan, a political scientist at Dartmouth College, said trust in the mid-20th century was unnaturally high and polarization was unnaturally low, bolstered by unusual growth in middle class income and a reduction of inequality, which is when the "20th century version of the American dream and the trust in government to produce it was fully mythologized."

“There was an usually high level of trust that came out of World War II, before the turn towards a more cynical view of the institutions of society — especially politics and media — after Vietnam and Watergate," Nyhan said.

So how much more polarization can we expect?

Social scientists aren't sure, but they agree Trump complicates things.

"He really is an us-versus-them figure," Kahan said. "People aren’t thinking about the arguments. They’re thinking about what side they're on."

Stephanie Woodend, left, a PHD student in Medical Geography at the University of Ottawa and Abby Dalton, a masters student in Geography at the University of Ottawa, participate in the March for Science on Parliament Hill in Ottawa, Canada.
Justin Tang, The Canadian Press, via AP

David Fink holds a sign as he joins thousands of people gathering together at the Historic Capitol building downtown Tallahassee, Fla. for the March for Science.
Joe Rondone, Tallahassee Democrat, via USA TO

In some ways, we have always lived in a post-truth era

Think about the way you search for information. If you’re a new mom who believes vaccines cause autism (and a number of women in your mommy group do, too) are you searching for research that shows whether they actually do, or are you Googling “vaccines cause autism” to find stories to affirm your belief? (Studies show there is no link between vaccines and autism.)

The mother above is probably motivated by fear. Such “motivated reasoning,” says political scientist Charles Taber of Stony Brook University, shows that we are all fundamentally biased.

“You have a basic psychological tendency to perpetuate your own beliefs,” he said “to really … discount anything that runs against your own prior views.”

It gets even more complicated. Once we’ve convinced ourselves of something, research suggests facts don’t appeal to us. A study co-led by Nyhan found that trying to correct a person’s misperception can have a “backfire effect.” When you encounter facts that don’t support your idea, your belief in that idea actually grows stronger.

So what if we did a better job teaching people how science works? Doesn't help, Kahan said. Research shows people with the most science intelligence are also the most partisan.

How you and your brain can do your part

It’s not knowledge but curiosity, Kahan says, that makes us more likely to accept scientific truths. A recent study that Kahan led found people with more scientific curiosity were more likely to be open-minded about information that challenged their existing political views.

And arguing helps, too. Scientists Hugo Mercier and Dan Sperber contend in their new book, The Enigma of Reason, that reason isn't something that evolved so humans could solve problems on their own. It developed so we could work together.

Instead of forcing someone to agree that climate change is caused by humans, Graves said, you can stop once you agree that, for example, flooding in Florida is a problem, and that you have to fix it (the bipartisan Southeast Florida Regional Climate Change Compact can teach us about that).

Marcia McNutt, an American geophysicist and president of the National Academy of Sciences, said she isn’t worried about a crisis of science, though she hopes more people would understand “science is about the unbiased search for truth" — and that benefits everyone.

“Being a scientist only means that when I have an intuition about something, I test that intuition, and see if I’m right,” she said. “A very, very smart mentor told me once, ‘I don't trust anyone who hasn't at least changed their mind once in their career.’”

An artist's impression of stone monoliths found buried near Stonehenge could have been part of the largest Neolithic monument built in Britain, archaeologists say. The 4,500-year-old stones, some measuring 15 feet in length, were discovered under 3 feet earth at the Durrington Walls "superhenge."
Stonehenge Hidden Landscape Project via European Pressphoto Agency

Overview of burial excavations at Jamestown, where the skeletal remains of four leaders have been uncovered along with a tantalizing artifact that hints at religious practices.
Courtesy of Jamestown Rediscovery Foundation (Preservation Virginia)

Palaeontologists have found the remnants of the turtle's ancestor, the 240-million-year-old prehistoric Pappochelys rosinae, which fills in the gaps about how turtles got their shells. P. rosinae had the makings of a shell, with T-shaped ribs and hard webbing along its belly. Full shells didn't appear until around 214 million years ago, reports Discover, perhaps when the turtle's ancestors were water-dwelling and needed to protect their major organs as well as control buoyancy.
Daniel Naupold, EPA

A massive black hole whose mass is 12 billion times that of our sun's is believed to be found by scientists billions of light years from Earth. (Image is an artist's impression of a black hole.)
Zhao-Yu Li, Shanghai Astronomical Observatory via EPA

A drawing of the world's largest-ever flying bird, Pelagornis sandersi, shows its size next to a California condor, bottom left, and a Royal albatross, bottom right. The giant bird's skeleton was discovered in 1983 near Charleston, but its first formal description was released July 7 by the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
Liz Bradford, Bruce Museum via AP

Exoplanet Kepler 421-b orbits its star every 704 days, the longest-known year for an exoplanet, according to the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. It was discovered at the "frost line" — the crucial distance that divides rocky planets from gaseous planets about 1,000 light-years from Earth.
David A. Aguilar, Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics

A new species of dinosaur had feathers not just on its wings but also on its hind legs, making it one of only a handful of "four-winged" dinosaurs. It also had big, sharp teeth and sharp claws, indicating it was carnivorous. Scientists report in 'Nature Communications' that the extraordinarily long tail feathers of the Changyuraptor yang could have helped save the animal from crash landings.
Stephanie Abramowicz, Dinosaur Institute, NHM

Unlike the other 60-plus known species of horned dinosaurs, the newly-discovered Mercuriceratops, center, has wing-like protrusions on the side of its skull. Measuring about 20 feet long and weighing more than 2 tons, Mercuriceratops lived about 77 million years ago. The species is named after Mercury, the Roman god with the winged helmet, says Michael Ryan, the lead author of a report published in June on Mercuriceratops in the journal 'Naturwissenschaften.'
Danielle Dufault

Researchers have discovered evidence of water — enough to fill oceans — embedded in minerals deep beneath the surface of the United States that could alter the current understanding of Earth's composition and how it was formed. Were this water in liquid form, which it is not, the discovery could be considered the planet's largest underground water reservoir, researchers said. The team of researchers, led by geophysicist Steve Jacobsen and seismologist Brandon Schmandt, has found pockets of magma about 400 miles beneath Earth's surface — clear signs of the presence of water, though not in its familiar liquid form. Here is hydrous ringwoodite synthesized from olivine in Jacobson’s laboratory.
Steve Jacobsen

A sea creature previously thought to be a sea anemone belongs to an order of it's own, researchers found. The Relicanthus daphneae lives near deep sea thermal vents in the Pacific and had been considered a giant sea anemone because of it's boneless, immobile carnivorous state. But while the anemone lost it skeleton over millions of years of evolution, R. daphneae never had them. "Putting these animals in the same group would be like classifying worms and snakes together because neither have legs," says researcher Estefanía Rodríguez. (Picture: A diver looks at a sea anemone off Saba island in the Caribbean in 2012.)
Brian Witte, AP

An exploratory dig for Los Angeles' subway extension project uncovered Ice Age fossils, including geoducks (or large clams, pictured), sand dollars and digger pine tree cones and seeds. A rock found in the dig "appears to have a sea lion skull within it that is perhaps 2 million years or more old," according to the Metro Rail's blog. The expansion of L.A.'s purple line is near the La Brea Tar Pits, where many fossils have been found.
LA Metro

Beekeeper Anthony Cantrell of Burlington, Vt., discovered zombie bees in his hive in October, the first time they had been found in the eastern U.S. John Hafernik, a professor from San Francisco State University, discovered the first zombie bees in 2008. A fly called Apocephalus borealis attaches itself to the bee and injects its eggs, which grow inside the bee, Hafernik said. Scientists believe it causes neurological damage resulting in erratic, jerky movement and night activity, "like a zombie," Hafernik told the Associated Press. These aren't undead bees doomed to roam for eternity. They often die only a few hours after showing symptoms, Hafernik said.
Andy Duback, AP

The duck-billed dinosaur known as Edmontosaurus regalis was supposed to be a plain Jane of the Cretaceous. Now scientists have discovered that it actually had a spectacular adornment unique in the dinosaur world. A beautifully preserved new fossil shows Edmontosaurus boasted a party hat of jiggly flesh atop its head. Researchers theorize that like a rooster's coxcomb, the crest was brightly colored and served as a signal to others of its kind. Never before have scientists found such a non-bony crest on a dinosaur.
Juliis Csotonyi, Current Biology

Potentially the world's oldest-known wine cellar was discovered in what is now present-day Israel. Anthropologist Eric Cline, who helped unearth the site, says the cellar was near a hall where banquets took place in the 75-acre Tel Kabri site in Israel. The ruins date back to about 1700 B.C. Overall, 40 jars, the equivalent of 3,000 bottles of wine, were found packed in a 15-by-25 foot storage room, Cline said.
Skyview Photography

The Hubble Space Telescope photographed a never-before-seen asteroid with at least six comet-like tails on Sept. 10, and then again two weeks later. The spinning space rock, designated P/2013 P5, looked like "a rotating lawn sprinkler," says lead investigator David Jewitt of the University of California-Los Angeles.
NASA, ESA, D. Jewitt , UCLA

Paleontologists unveiled in November a new dinosaur discovered four years ago in southern Utah that proves giant tyrant dinosaurs like the Tyrannosaurus rex were around 10 million years earlier than previously believed. The fossils were found in the Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument in November 2009, and a team of paleontologists spent four years digging them up and traveling the world to confirm they were a new species. Paleontologists believe the dinosaur lived 80 million years ago in the late Cretaceous Period on a landmass in the flooded central region of North America.
Audrey Atuchin, Natural History Museum of Utah, via AP

Tamu Massif, a monster volcano roughly the size of Arizona, ranks among the largest such structures in our solar system, 'Nature' reports by way of a Nature Geoscience study. But Tamu Massif differs from typical seamounts in that it has a nearly indiscernible slope—around 1 degree near the summit (which sits 6,500 feet below the surface), and much less near the base, National Geographic reports. And lead author William Sager says other oceanic plateaus could also be volcanoes: "There may be bigger ones out there."
Newslook

The Cold Spot area resides in the constellation Eridanus in the southern galactic hemisphere. The insets show the environment of this anomalous patch of the sky as mapped by Szapudi’s team using PS1 and WISE data and as observed in the cosmic microwave background temperature data taken by the Planck satellite. The angular diameter of the vast supervoid aligned with the Cold Spot, which exceeds 30 degrees, is marked by the white circles.
ESA Planck Collaboration, Graphics by Gergo Kránicz

Fifty years of National Science Foundation investment led to the first detection of gravitational waves mid-February. The find confirms Albert Einstein's predictions about the strength of gravity, and it also gives us new information about black holes, two of which are pictured above in a computer simulation.
LIGO Observatories

National Institutes of Health researches reported in January 2017 the discovery of molecular mechanisms that could be responsible for a form of premenstrual syndrome, opening the door to treatment possibilities.
Duane Lempke, Sisson Studios, Inc. via NIH

A star named Kepler achieved the status of roundest natural object ever discovered in the universe, according to a study from November 2016.
Laurent Gizon et al. and the Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research, Germany. Illustration by Mark A. Garlick.

In February 2017, researchers determined Zealandia, a piece of land east of Australia, qualifies as a continent despite the fact that 94 percent of it is under water.
Nick Mortimer and colleagues, GSA Today